Forgive me in advance as I am not a mage main, however I have been doing a lot of research with the DF Alpha into specs, classes and talent trees coming in the new Xpac.
I know more experienced mages will highlight the major issues with the flow of the talent trees but I wanted to talk about the fun aspect.
As far as I can see, unlike Warlocks and Paladins for example who are receiving a whole host of new passive and active abilities, Fire Mage just seems to be a complete copy of how it currently is? No new active spells as far as I can see and the passive spells all seem a bit… plain?
I may be wrong and I am hoping you can shed some light on this for me but am I right? Even Arcane get Arcane Surge which is new and flashy but Fire just seems… bland, boring and a complete copy paste… with a few cuts on the way.
Tempered Flames (which on its own possibly brings an entirely new, never seen before, way to play)
Blaster Master (a blast from the past)
Incendiary Eruptions (making LB relevant again)
Fervent Flickering (datamined new talent, more fireblasts is always good)
Improved Phoenix Flames if opted into
Bonus: decent flexibility providing options for at least 4 different builds to fill various niches; ability to simultaneously take our best endpoint talents like Pyroclasm + Kindling which was never possible before.
The only con seen so far is that virtually no build can skip Pyroblast hardcasting playstyles, which could be a deterrent to some players.
Spec Tree’s look very decent now. Its the Mage Base Tree. Still messy and just stuff from Shadowlands. Mass Polymorph makes no sense. Ice Nova is a fossil from WoD, which interacts good only if you Shatter Meteor or Comet Storm. Why Shatter has only 1/1 node? Ring Of Frost is Incapacitate effect… We have 3 different castable CC on DR… 1/1 Tomes are joke…
There is a good chance our raid build in 10.0 will be the same as is now just with bl leggo and meteor from the class tree. OP is right. We do have more changes for aoe and pvp but hard to see anything beating out skb.
Can Mage “devs” explain why the hell would anyone take Blastwave and not Volatile Detonation afterwards…? Base Tree needs to be compressed and more interesting stuff from the past added. Just look at Shaman Tree. Thats how you do it…
Do you think people’ll aim for shifting power with the updated trees, or is it still not worth spending talent points on without the conduit and unity effects?
Fire will most likely aim for Shifting Power regardless of conduit/unity effects. Any extra cdr will be welcomed by kindling builds, and the AoE damage potency of Shifting should not be disregarded.
I don’t think it’ll be used in ST, I think meteor and time warp thingy will be stronger. I think its 12sec cdr on a 4sec cast… It’ll still be good on aoe for the dmg it does.
Also you should be able to macro meteor @target now since 9.2.5 which will be a nice QoL change.
Ye but we already have cdr on combustion, fire blast and pf from other talents. Cdr on timewarp desyncs it from your groups timewarp/bl.
I think meteor will be better on ST but I’ll bow down to the sims. Could be meteor in 10.0 and shifting power overtakes it with scaling. Could be it changes depending on which talents you take in the fire tree like skb and firemind vs fiery rush or tempered flames. I love these trees
Wait… WAIT. WAIT. Since when is this macro a thing? Does that just mean you can flamestrike under your target without having to aim with the cursor altogether? Or am I misunderstanding what this does?
